Program aims to ensure Trenton students are immunized before school starts

Families wait to be called for a physical during a health fair held by St. Francis Medical Center School of Nursing. The health fair was open to families and was held August 25, 2012 in Trenton at St. Francis Medical Center. Mary Iuvone/For the Times

TRENTON — It’s becoming something of a back-to-school ritual in the city school district.

Kids, often preschoolers or kindergartners, come to school without having received the necessary immunizations, and they have to be sent home until they get the polio or chicken pox shots they’re missing.

The problems are threefold: the kids miss class time, they’re at risk for infection, and school nurses are forced to begin the year with a flurry of paperwork and phone calls to parents and doctors’ offices.

It’s not an ideal way to kick off the school year.

“We don’t want to have to exclude students because ... they’re missing classroom time, but on the other hand, with these diseases, you don’t want to have a major outbreak with any of your major diseases and then all of a sudden it’s spreading,” said Marge Dooley, the Trenton school district’s supervisor of nurses.

This year, a new pilot program spearheaded by Capital Health in conjunction with the school district, is attempting to cut down on the number of kids starting school without up-to-date immunizations.

Elaysha Thompson and Amy Diefenbach, two Mercer County Community College nursing students brought on by Capital Health in July, have tracked 626 new students registered in the district throughout the summer, ensuring that each child has received the necessary shots — or if they haven’t, helping their parents set up appointments at clinics like Capital Health Family Medicine and physicians’ offices.

“We track all the parents and then we do follow-up calls a week later, asking them: ‘Oh, did you make your appointment? Do you need help with that?’ ” Diefenbach said.

When parents signed up their kids at the district’s central registration building, they could stop by a table staffed by Thompson, Diefenbach and a school nurse. The three would take down any medical and contact information for students and parents and help them navigate the alphabet soup of vaccinations, determining whether the child needed an MMR, a DTaP or an IPV immunization.

That’s the measles, mumps, rubella shot; the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis booster; and the inactivated polio vaccine — just a few of the shots featured on the lengthy list of vaccines school-age children must receive before they’re allowed to attend school.

“Children, they play with each other, they touch each other, and a lot of diseases are preventable (but) they can spread once they go into these common areas where they sit together, eat together,” said Dr. Adity Bhattacharyya, the medical director of Capital Health Family Medicine.

Families without insurance can receive free immunizations and physicals at the Bellevue Avenue clinic. Immunizations are important not only because they are mandated by the state, but also because they shield kids from infections and bolster the herd immunity to contagious diseases that have been making a comeback, the doctor said.

“A lot of communicable diseases happen because primary immunity is starting to dissipate,” Bhattacharyya said. “Take pertussis (whooping cough). There’s a resurgence of pertussis throughout the country because kids were not getting vaccinated, and boosters were not being given.”

“You have parents who are truly grateful because it slips their mind that registration was going on or they needed to update their records,” Thompson said.

The MCCC student nurses, whose last day was Thursday, also provided a helping hand to school nurses by cutting down on the last-minute scramble on the first day of school.

“What happens is a lot of our time is then consumed with identifying the kids who aren’t up-to-date and then spending hours and hours writing up papers and sending them home and calling parents and calling doctors’ offices,” said Ann Briggs, a school nurse at Grace A. Dunn Middle School.

The kids identified by Capital Health and the school district as in need of immunizations are typically new students being registered for preschool or kindergarten, or students coming in from out-of-state or another country. Often, they aren’t in compliance, parents can’t find the paperwork proving their child has been immunized, or they lack health insurance and can’t afford a visit to the doctor.

And the number of kids who start school without their shots?

“It’s a large percentage,” Dooley said.

“Our kindergarten registration starts in January, so we’ve already started registering students, who still sometimes show up without their immunizations in September.”

For Capital Health, the program is not only about getting school kids off to a good start, but also about helping families become familiar with their local medical options and bringing kids in for annual checkups.

“We’re trying to set up this network offering all children a medical home,” Bhattacharyya said. The hope is that once the vaccinations are given, the children will come back to the office and “we can tackle other issues like asthma or obesity that tend to be common in children at this age,” Bhattacharyya said.

The Tremendously Trenton Coalition, St. Francis Medical Center, the Trenton board of education and other organizations held a youth health fair on Saturday offering free physicals and immunizations to kids. Another fall community health fair is scheduled for Oct. 27 at Crean Hall in St. Francis Medical Center.